Carlos Garrido Castellano – författare

The main objective of this book is to explain how contemporary literatures in Spanish and Portuguese are dealing with artistic creativity when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination. The project positions the contemporary art novel as the most suitable place to understand how the economisation of cultural labour is affecting writers and artists alike. The authors examined in this book, including José Saramago, Rita Indiana Hernández, María Gainza, Mayra Santos Febres and Ondjaki (amongst others) explore the contradictions of the art market, the dynamics of art education, the multifaceted activity of curators and socially engaged artists in relation to broader debates on the role of culture in the configuration of socioeconomic dynamics. The book maps a new trend within contemporary literature that taps into the visual art system to reassess the role of literature in critical ways.

The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. Challenging these forces and representations, Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that something more must be added to the discussion in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art arises from several years of field research and curatorial activity in museums, universities, and cultural institutions of Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This book explores the ways in which Caribbean individuals and communities have recurred to art and visual creativity to create and sustain public spaces of discussion and social interaction. The book analyzes contemporary Caribbean art in relation to broader discussions of citizenship, cultural agency, critical geography, migration, and social justice. Covering a broad range of artistic projects, including curatorial practice, socially engaged art, institutional politics, public art, and performance, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share.

The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. Challenging these forces and representations, Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that something more must be added to the discussion in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art arises from several years of field research and curatorial activity in museums, universities, and cultural institutions of Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This book explores the ways in which Caribbean individuals and communities have recurred to art and visual creativity to create and sustain public spaces of discussion and social interaction. The book analyzes contemporary Caribbean art in relation to broader discussions of citizenship, cultural agency, critical geography, migration, and social justice. Covering a broad range of artistic projects, including curatorial practice, socially engaged art, institutional politics, public art, and performance, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share.

The main objective of this book is to explain how contemporary literatures in Spanish and Portuguese are dealing with artistic creativity when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination. The project positions the contemporary art novel as the most suitable place to understand how the economisation of cultural labour is affecting writers and artists alike. The authors examined in this book, including José Saramago, Rita Indiana Hernández, María Gainza, Mayra Santos Febres and Ondjaki (amongst others) explore the contradictions of the art market, the dynamics of art education, the multifaceted activity of curators and socially engaged artists in relation to broader debates on the role of culture in the configuration of socioeconomic dynamics. The book maps a new trend within contemporary literature that taps into the visual art system to reassess the role of literature in critical ways.

This book develops a critical intervention in the politics of time and anticolonial aesthetics. Engaging with recent debates on cultural activism and postcolonial and decolonial studies, the main objective of this volume is to examine the ways in which anticolonial cultural analysis and production keeps nurturing contemporary processes of progressive social transformation. The chapters in this volume argue that anticolonialism should not be bounded to a specific historical moment (that of postcolonial nation-building); rather, it should be seen as a fertile, radical tradition going beyond the specific event of decolonization and informing utopian and radical futures.The twelve essays engage with this argument from a wide variety of disciplines, including film studies, art history, literary criticism, and cultural and visual studies. It is intended for scholars, activists, and students across disciplines who are interested in the intersections of culture, politics, and social change.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions.

Analyzes socially engaged art practices worldwide, linking them to decolonial struggle and critique.Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework-that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of "political art" at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched-an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives.

Analyzes socially engaged art practices worldwide, linking them to decolonial struggle and critique.Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework-that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of "political art" at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched-an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives.

Combining postcolonial studies, curating and contemporary art, this book surveys the role played by artistic curatorship and contemporary art museums in the shaping of identities and cultural planning in contemporary Iberia. The book's main hypothesis is that contemporary art has been pivotal in the construction of contemporary Iberia, a process marked by the attention paid (in heterogeneous, not always satisfactory ways) to the entanglement of the legacies of colonialism and the present-day status of Iberian territories as cosmopolitan societies now integrated in the European Union. We argue that, at least from the 1990s, curating emerged as a key activity for Iberian societies to display and configure an image of themselves as modern and fully integrated in the European cultural landscape. Such an image, however, had to cope with the legacies of colonialism and the profound socioeconomic transformations of these societies. This book is concerned with bringing together, while redefining and expanding, Iberian and curatorial studies.

Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times posits the carnivalesque as a fertile laboratory to understand and go past our crisis-driven contemporaneity. The book engages with sound and noise from Cádiz, one of the capital cities of carnival in Spain, to situate carnivalesque mobilisation as a vibrant platform where our capacity to redemocratise our societies and to envisage liveable futures is revitalised. Chorus argues that the connection between freedom and carnival (carnival being a parenthesis that “liberates” individual subjectivity) has to be profoundly rethought, as freedom and spontaneity have become part of neoliberal governability.Chorus demonstrates that carnival music is crucial to understand collective ways of being and acting in common, ways that go beyond the structured and established avenues of “formal”, parliamentary politics. Carnival music is also essential to understand and move beyond a carnivalised politics (laughter being simultaneously used to open and curtail public debate; neo-conservative jester-kings that are ascending to power; and a long etcetera). More importantly, carnival sonics is a public intervention that brings its own situated, practice-based thinking. In Chorus, I argue that participating in carnival groups implies acting and being in public politically.

Dealing with contemporary literary production from Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Macau, Canada and Goa, the volume also tries to reimagine issues of cultural labour and the expansion of artistic modes of self-definition from the point of view of contemporary literary production in Portuguese.